Open meetings failures found

Sunday

Apr 15, 2007 at 2:00 AM

Sometimes the public's business isn't done in public. And that's OK, as long as it's done right. But a Sunday Record audit of city, town, village and school boards found that nearly two-thirds closed their meetings to the public in ways that skirted or flat-out violated the state's Open Meetings Law.

Chris Mele and Ramsey Al-Rikabi

Sometimes the public's business isn't done in public. And that's OK, as long as it's done right. But a Sunday Record audit of city, town, village and school boards found that nearly two-thirds closed their meetings to the public in ways that skirted or flat-out violated the state's Open Meetings Law.

Enacted in 1977, the Open Meetings Law lays out the public's right to attend meetings, listen to debates and watch the deciders decide.

But every now and then comes a topic that should be discussed without the public's eyes and ears. The term for such a closed-door meeting in New York is "executive session."

It works like this: A board member makes a motion to go into executive session and is supposed to cite a specific reason under the law. Another board member seconds it, the board votes, and if the ayes have it, the conversation can go on behind closed doors, minus the public.

But the law says there must be a valid reason to close the meeting and it lists eight such reasons.

"What that procedure is about is accountability," said Robert Freeman, executive director of the state's Committee on Open Government.

In Town of Fallsburg, for instance, no vote was taken before the board closed its meeting to interview a prospective town employee.

"In this case, I didn't think it was warranted," said Fallsburg Supervisor Steve Levine, when asked about the move later.

In the absence of a specific vote or reason to go into an executive session, Freeman said, "we just don't know whether the public body is complying with the law."

Failing to state the reason clearly to the public appears to be the greatest deficiency in the executive sessions surveyed.

The Sunday Record, working with journalism students from Mount Saint Mary College, visited 43 public meetings in February and March.

Twenty-nine of those meetings resulted in executive sessions. In 18 of those cases, officials either disregarded the Open Meetings Law or took shortcuts around it.

Two of the most frequently cited reasons for executive sessions are "personnel" and "litigation." Though those reasons might be within the spirit of the law, both are too general to be sufficient, Freeman said.

"How many different kinds of subjects can you describe as 'personnel'?" he asked. "If the school board wants to eliminate the English department, that's a personnel issue," though clearly not a debate the board can bar the public from hearing.

He said he would have hoped that the Record's audit would have produced better results.

"The law is not complicated. It has been in effect for 30 years. From my perspective, there is no good excuse for (these) kinds of failures," he said.